Red Recondite

Up-to-date weather information + Google Maps = Best Thing Ever.

And here I thought I was clever.  Alas.

The Wii Wheel is surprisingly well crafted.  I expected it to be a worthless hunk of plastic, because:

1. My Gamecube steering wheel makes Mario Kart Double Dash unplayable.
2. Excite Truck’s wii-mote steering is not very accurate.
3. The Wii Zapper, a similar peripheral, is annoying at best.

And yet, somehow, the Wii Wheel works well.  The only problem I have with it is hopping into a turn while skidding in the wrong direction, but I experienced the same difficulties in Mario Kart DS, where only the D-Pad is to blame.

TiVo recently announced the discontinuation of their TiVo Rewards program. I had amassed 10,000 of these mystical TiVo Rewards points while participating in some odd rituals that I do not understand and cannot adequately explain. Clearly, I had some spending to do. Read the rest of this entry »

I read about it on the gaming blogs, but I didn’t believe it in my heart.

I just experienced my second red-ring-of-death… jeez. I got my first 360 back in May of 2006, and it died a good 13 months later in June 2007. Yesterday, the new one died, a scant 9 months later. Thankfully, I purchased the Best Buy replacement plan both times, so I replaced it without any hassle.

I still prefer the 360 to the other current-generation consoles, but this high failure rate is very ridiculous.

I have been working on a WPF (Windows Presentation Framework) application using Visual C# 2008 Express. Even though I am at the Initial Optimism phase of Software Development, and my imagination is running wild, I know that nothing will probably become of this work.

The basic goal is to play videos encoded with a number of different codecs (i.e. h.264, Xvid, and DivX). So, I thought, before I went into all of the other features that this application will do, I’ll keep things simple and just play a video with the filename hard-coded.

It’s the year 2008. I have the latest Microsoft tools available. Playing a video can’t be that difficult, can it? Read the rest of this entry »